Never Again

**see part one for notes and disclaimers**


Section 2:

When the war ended, the Order headquarters disbanded. The building was locked up and they were all, frankly, relieved to let it go. The war was over, and it wasn’t needed anymore. It was finally time for all of them to get on with their lives. Hermione was initially relieved to say goodbye to Blaise and Draco. Sure, she and Draco had learned to tolerate each other rather well, and she and Blaise had come to work well together and had, through it all, ended up as somewhat-friends, but she knew separating herself from them was the best thing she could do. Without Blaise and Draco around, flaunting themselves and their lush, irresistible sexuality in plain sight where any inquisitively-minded girl could be affected, she’d surely be able to clear her mind and work her way past her ridiculous obsession.

Because that’s all it was: just a silly little fixation that made her believe she was something that she really *wasn’t*. The lust-driven, sex-obsessed, cat-in-heat with a well-stuffed shoebox of sex toys and a driving need to orgasm a bare minimum of once a day wasn’t really *her*. She was Hermione Granger: nerd extraordinaire. Hermione could help you with your income taxes. If you needed a root canal, Hermione was your girl. But humping and bumping wasn’t Hermione’s thing. Really, it wasn’t. She wasn’t sexy or sensuous or erotic or exciting. And in spite of all the pleasure she’d found with her hand in her panties and images of Slytherins dancing in her head, she knew it had to be just a fluke. She was . . . just emotional because of the war, and because of the danger they were all in. With all that tension built up, it was inevitable that she find some sort of outlet, and if that outlet was a bit out of character for her, what did it really matter? The war would end and everything would go back to normal. The way that she watched Blaise and Draco, the way she *sought out* opportunities to watch them together, and they way she responded to the sight didn’t really *mean* anything. Of course it didn’t. She wasn’t that kind of girl when the world wasn’t at war.

So when the war ended, and she bid farewell to the rest of the Order and started out her life on her own, this odd addiction of hers would end, too. She’d be back to normal, as good as new, once she got away from it all. No more odd, irresistible urges. No more explosive solo sessions. No more voyeurism or eroticism or isms of any shape and kind. She’d put all thoughts of Blaise and Draco behind her, and all the odd feelings the two of them had stirred in her would go away of their own accord. Out of sight, out of mind. Hear no evil, see no evil. Living a life free from the path of temptation, and all of that. But what was that other cliche? Something about the path to hell and a lovely pavement compiled from good intentions?

It wasn’t a problem at first after she bid Draco and Blaise a very final sort of farewell. The end of the war left her monstrously busy, with all the interviews and celebrations and other such nonsense, not to mention preparing to start her new job. For the first few post-war weeks, she found that she was too worn out to even *think* of enjoying a little stress-relief at night with her favorite toys (and her favorite mental images). But before too long, her pace eased up and she found herself once again with time on her hands. Too much time. More than enough time to notice that she was, to her surprise, experiencing symptoms of withdrawal.

She grew moody and irritable, and had trouble sleeping. She lost her appetite and developed a string of nervous habits to work off her excess energy. She spent a lot more time in her favorite sex shop, buying new toys she’d never even heard of just a few months earlier. She even branched out from toys into male-on-male videotapes. It wasn’t difficult for the shop keepers to discern just what appealed to her taste, and before long, they started putting things aside that they knew would appeal to her. When she walked in one day and they showed her a ‘just in’ videotape featuring a dark-skinned boy and his white-blond partner on the cover, she bought it without a second thought, and didn’t even bother to read the information on the back of the box. She was, therefore, shocked when, in the middle of the darker one pounding the living daylights out of the blond boy, the two men were joined by a woman. Sure, it was a blonde woman with enormous, clearly manufactured breasts, but the response Hermione had to the image was electric.

She had considered (hell, she had *watched*) every permutation of male-on-male action between the videos she had bought and the live shows Blaise and Draco had provided so many times, but menage-a-trois was an entirely new concept. Imagining Blaise and Draco’s faces on the video’s porn stars images was enough to set her blood on fire, but when she imagined herself as the girl who joined them, it drove her to such a point of lust that she dug out the unopened tube of lubricant while casting a splitting spell on her favorite dildo to make it two-headed. As the video played out in front of her, she proceeded to teach her body the wealth of sensations available from these brand new combinations and positions. She always had been an eager learner. In the moment that her desperate, screaming, soul-wrenching orgasm hit, she had an epiphany.

This was her. This sweaty, sated, debauched-looking woman still shaking from a truly excellent orgasm while trying to determine if she had the energy for another round was *her*. It really was. After years of thinking that she just ‘wasn’t the kind of girl’ who could feel things like that, she had finally come into her own as a sexual being. The changes in her that she had noted since the first time she saw Draco and Blaise were not just a phase or a momentary aberration. She wouldn’t be able to outgrow her feelings or move past them or talk herself out of them. No longer was she just the dusty, bushy bookworm she had always viewed herself as being. Oh, the bookworm was still there, but from that time forward she would be a sexual object every bit as much as she was an intellectual one. It made her feel more complete, more alive, more aware of herself, and more *certain* of herself than she had ever been before. Even if no one else ever saw her like that, even if the rest of the world viewed her as sexless and undesirable for the rest of her life, this sensual hunger inside of her was a part of her that would not go away. For the first time she could remember, she felt like a woman, a *complete* woman, with everything that a woman had to offer a man. It was *quite* a nice feeling.

On the other hand, the depth of her feelings for a particular pair of men that she’d like to offer herself to was nowhere near as pleasant. She had thought that her crushes on Draco and Blaise would go the way of all crushes and fade slowly away once they were no longer an active part of her life. They didn’t. Instead, it appeared that as she increased her experimentation with all of the erotic possibilities available to a woman who lived alone with lots of time on her hands and an infinitely curious mind, her hunger for that particular pair of men got stronger, not weaker. Rather in the manner of a Frankenstein monster, they had, all unknowingly, brought her to sexual life, and every sensual appetite she acquired made her long for them all the more. Videos weren’t enough; she was going crazy with longing for the real thing.

She didn’t think of joining them. No, in spite of the new possibilities opened from the trio-tape and the mind-blowing orgasm it had given her, she knew better than to think that either Blaise or Draco would ever consider allowing her to join them in bed. They were out of her league on so many levels and for so many reasons that it was laughable to even think of it. Offering herself to them would only end in her humiliation and the destruction of an odd (but infinitely treasured) bit of friendship with Blaise, still maintained by owl post and the occasional meeting over a pot of tea. No, what she wanted was just to watch them again. She wanted to watch them touch, and taste, and suck, and fuck. She wanted to watch them explore each other in every tawdry, dirty way imaginable, and then go home and replay it all in her mind with her hands on her body. She wanted them to continue being her teachers in what they had already taught her so well.

Yeah, and she also wanted world peace, and knew she stood about as much a chance of getting it. Sadly, her body was frustratingly stubborn when it came to listening to her logical mind. It craved the sight of Blaise and Draco, and the craving seemed to grow stronger every day. When she found herself contemplating stealing Harry’s invisibility cloak so she could go to the other side of town to spy through the windows of Blaise’s flat, she knew that something needed to be done.

After some careful self-analysis, she became convinced that she knew just the way to get rid of her increasingly embarrassing obsession. It would be easy; all she had to do was get laid. Hermione convinced herself that the root of her problem was sexual frustration. Her body needed satisfaction and had latched onto the fantasy of those two particular men simply because they were attractive and readily, demonstrably capable of both giving and receiving quite a bit of satisfaction. But she didn’t need them. Really, she didn’t. She just needed sex; she was sure of it. If she was able to get a decent amount of non-solo sex on a regular basis, her silly fixation would fade away.

Hermione The Sexually Aware turned into Hermione The Sexual Predator, on the prowl for a likely sort of man to relieve her of the burden of a virginity or two. She shocked Ron and Harry speechless when she casually agreed to let Ginny fix her up on a blind date, but her wonderfully loyal boys were quick to jump on the bandwagon and start fixing her up with anyone they could find which mostly, of course, consisted of co-workers of theirs. She went on more dates in the weeks that followed than she had been on in her entire life, put together. Sadly, the dates did not go as well as Hermione might have hoped. Harry and Ron were stronger in their enthusiasm than they were in their taste. Horny she might be, but Hermione still wasn’t *desperate*. Or rather, she wasn’t quite that desperate *yet*. Fortunately, before things were allowed to reach too critical a stage, she met Tom.

Tom was a researcher for the Ministry of Magic and an attendee at a conference featuring Hermione as a speaker. He was handsome and charming and flatteringly interested in getting to know her better . . . and the conference had put her up in a very nice hotel room with a mini-bar. After he took her out for a very pleasant dinner, it was the essence of simplicity to invite him up for a late-night drink that quickly developed into a late-night snog, and then some. When she slipped into the loo to “freshen up a bit” while bidding him to “make himself comfortable,” she pulled out the emergency kit she had prepared for just this occasion. On went the silky/lacy/barely-there bit of naughtiness she had chosen as the ideal costume and down the hatch went a range of potions to make the experience as safe, painless, and hopefully enjoyable as possible. Never let it be said that Hermione Granger allowed herself to be caught unprepared. One teeth-cleaning and breath-freshening charm later, and she was ready to go.

And go she did. She went and Tom went and then went together a time or two all night long, and Hermione was pleased to discover that sex with a partner really was quite good. She and Tom quite enjoyed each other. They enjoyed each other that night. They enjoyed each other the next morning. They enjoyed each other every night after that for the rest of the conference, and they even enjoyed each other once in a quickie behind the podium during a lunch break. When the conference was over and they both returned to London, he was quick to send her an owl inviting her to dinner so they could enjoy themselves all over again. She accepted. Sex with a partner, even after the initial awkwardness of adjusting to a person instead of a far-more-maneuverable toy, wasn’t quite the sunburst ecstasy she had hoped it would be, but she chalked that up to the difference between dreams and reality. As realities went, it really wasn’t half bad. She told herself that her obsession was finally cured.

After four very enjoyable months, she and Tom found that their pooled resources would allow them to find a very nice flat that they could share where they could thoroughly enjoy each other each and every night. When she packed her belongings for the move, Hermione ruthlessly purged her toy box. The videos were the first things to go as she convinced herself that she didn’t need them anymore. Nearly half the toys were discarded as well, keeping only those that could be fun for her and Tom to use together, along with a few for those evenings when Tom worked late at the ministry and she was home alone. She’d spent quite a bit of money on those toys, after all, and it would be a terrible shame to see them go to waste. Especially when Tom worked so very many late nights, supervising the interns. She kept the double-headed dildo from the night of her epiphany, but she told herself that it was only kept for nostalgia. (She told herself a lot of things. Most of the time, she believed them.)

After six months of living together, Tom offered Hermione a diamond ring signifying his intention to enjoy her for as long as they both should live. She accepted. Everyone was quite happy for them, and the wedding plans began right away. Everything seemed in place for Tom and Hermione to have a long, uncomplicated, perfectly enjoyable life together. But then one day, Hermione decided to surprise Tom by bringing him lunch at work, and caught him with his pants around his ankles while he thoroughly enjoyed a blow-job from a sixteen-year-old summer intern. While Hermione unquestionably enjoyed the little nonreversible curse she cast on Tom before leaving the office, the last traces of pleasure she would ever feel from Tom faded by the time she packed her bags and left their shared flat behind.

Once Tom got out of the hospital (it took a few days for the staff of St. Mungo’s to convince him that Hermione’s curse really was nonreversible), he tried to insist that Hermione take the flat, but she refused, wanting nothing more than to be rid of every trace of him remaining in her life. Finding a new place, however, proved more difficult than she had anticipated. Hermione’s job as the medical examiner for the Aurors had her keeping insane hours that didn’t factor in much time for house hunting. Harry and Ron had been terribly nice about letting her crash at their place for as long as she needed, and their girlfriends, Ginny and Padma, had been very understanding about her status as a semi-permanent guest crashing on the sofa, but Hermione couldn’t help but feel like a fifth wheel. When Padma reminded her that Parvati and Terry Boot were getting a flat together, leaving Terry’s former flatmate Blaise with an extra bedroom available, Hermione had been desperate enough to owl him right away.

She never expected that he would say yes. No matter how well she and Blaise had gotten along, she wasn’t foolish enough to believe that Blaise would choose a flatmate without his lover’s approval, and she had no reason to believe that Draco would ever approve. She was honestly surprised that the blond hadn’t done anything to put a stop to the friendship between her and Blaise. Draco was the possessive type, and she had no doubt that he wouldn’t want a mudblood anywhere near his favorite plaything. To say she was shocked to get a reply from Blaise the next day telling her she was welcome to the room if she wanted it would be stating the case mildly. She was not, however, one to look a gift thestral in the mouth, and with a little fancy wandwork, she had herself moved into the second bedroom by the end of that day.

She’d forced herself to be optimistic about the situation as she unpacked her things. The flat was lovely, really. It was in a better neighborhood than the one she’d lived in before, and was more convenient to work, as well. Blaise kept it very tidy, just the way she liked it, and seemed to listen to the same kinds of music as her as well, which was a definite plus in a flatmate. It would, doubtless, be far more relaxing living with a friend instead of a lover. Yes, it might be awkward having Draco as an overnight guest on occasion, but since he ran his business affairs from Malfoy Manor, surely he wouldn’t spend *too* much time in the flat. There was no reason for her to be nervous. No reason at all. She was cured now, wasn’t she? She’d lost her virginity, and she was certain that all the sexual tension she had felt before regarding the two of them had been lost right along with it.

She had almost managed to convince herself by the time Draco arrived at the flat during her first evening in her new home. Hermione heard the apparition pop and that unmistakable, patrician voice from the entryway, but ignored it, staying in her room with the door shut. There was no need to go out and say hello; Draco had come to see Blaise, after all, and not her, and they would, no doubt, head straight into Blaise’s room anyway. But then she heard it. It had been over a year since the last time she heard that particular sound, but she had not, despite her best attempts, managed to forget it. It was a combination of grunting, moaning, and a slight scraping sound that could not have been caused by anything she could think of other than a body bent over a convenient piece of furniture getting thoroughly fucked.

She wasn’t aware of moving. She wasn’t aware of crossing the room and putting her hand on the knob of the door, or feeling it turn under her hand. She wasn’t aware of anything in the world except for the sight suddenly before her eyes in living color, and the way it caused heat to flare between her thighs and weakness to take over the rest of her body. Gods below, they were even more beautiful than she remembered, and they were positioned just *perfectly* for her to watch. And watch she did. She watched Blaise pound into Draco’s arse while Blaise growled and Draco purred his satisfaction. She watched Blaise drop to his knees to swallow Draco’s shaft. She watched Draco come all over Blaise’s face before kneeling down beside him to lick it clean, and then lay his lover down on the carpet so he could turn his tongue to cleaning off all the sweat shining on Blaise’s skin. And when he finished, she watched as they started rolling around on the carpet again, building up new coatings of sweat as they rubbed against each other, sucking and nibbling and groping their way to a mutual climax.

Hermione stayed there until they finished. She didn’t move. She didn’t turn away. She wasn’t entirely certain that she blinked. And if it hadn’t been for those tell-tale spots dancing in front of her eyes, she probably wouldn’t have remembered to breathe. She just stood shock still, taking it all in, while her mind numbly processed just how dead *wrong* she had been to think that her fascination with them had passed. Once they finished and stumbled into the kitchen for a post-shag snack, Hermione very, very quietly shut her door before becoming a flurry of activity, grabbing her wand and casting a fast but effective silencing charm before digging frantically through her half-unpacked boxes to unearth her trusty vibrator.

That was the night she began her list of rules for ‘How to Live with Blaise without Causing Problems.’ Rule one: Never again put off buying spare batteries.


To be continued . . .